English 120

Patricia White

Spring 1997 Office hours: WTh 11-12

Wed. 1:30-5pm and by appointment

Kohlberg 201 PAC 208, x8148, pwhite1

Critical and Cultural Theory

This seminar will examine key authors, debates, texts and contexts in contemporary theory and cultural studies in order to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of cultural analysis, to develop an awareness of methodology and pedagogy, and to devise flexible ways of thinking of ourselves as subjects in culture.
We will address the role of language and ideology in constructing subjectivity, difference, and what we understand as "reality". We will look at how power is imbedded in institutions as well as in modes of representation and interpretation.We will seek to understand how "paradigm shifts"--from the legacies of Marx and Freud to structuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and multiculturalism--have affected forms of knowing and/in the academy. Reading closely and critically and placing work in historical and social context, we will discuss how various theories may be connected, productively in tension or even incompatible, as well as what traditions they presume or challenge. How, for example, should we understand the relationship between the theoretical privileging of difference and the cultural celebration of "diversity"?
While we will resist the notion that "theory" is something simply to be mastered and applied, neither will we be satisfied with the observation that everything is a text whose meaning is ultimately undecidable. We'll look at ways of theorizing not only literature and art, but popular culture and politics, self and other, institutions of state, family, and community--in short, "everyday life." Cultural Studies is a relatively recent interdisciplinary rubic for approaches to these phenomena, one which both extends and challenges what "theory" has come to mean in literary (and other) studies.

Requirements:

Rotating responsibility for leading seminar discussion--to be done in pairs.
Leaders may modify the reading list, add supplementary material (a poem, short story, video, background), etc. Class leaders should also bring refreshments for the break.

Weekly responses/notes to the reading (and/or to papers and reading questions if any) one page maximum; these will be presented orally at the beginning of each meeting but not graded. You may focus on one article.

Each week after our meeting one pair of participants will post a revised version of their response paper on the classes server. See handout on preparing reading notes. Other members of the class will be responsible for reading these postings.

Paper on a topic in cultural studies to be developed in successive versions, including annotated bibliography.

Texts available in the bookstore--purchase those you wish to own:

Roland Barthes, Mythologies and Image /Music /Text
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Charles Bernheimer, ed. In Dora's Case
Simon During, ed. The Cultural Studies Reader
Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, eds.A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 and Discipline and Punish
Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams and Dora
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits
Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1
Ferdinand de Saussure, A Course in General Linguistics
Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics
Raymond Williams, Keywords

Xeroxed readings (X) will be assembled in packets and available for purchase the second meeting.
I will announce in class which readings are primary for the week.

Copies of the xeroxed readings will be on reserve at the cirucluation desk.

Consult the honors shelf for additional materials. You can print out a list of reserve materials from Tripod. I would appreciate any recommendations for resources to be included on honors reserve.

Useful reference:

Caherine Belsey, Critical Practice

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory

Critical Terms for Literary Study

Dan Latimer, Contemporary Critical Theory.



English 120 Spring 1997
Critical and Cultural Theory

Week 1 Introduction-- The Theoretical Field

1/22 Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Raymond Williams, "Culture," "Literature," "Myth," "Theory," Keywords
Assignment: bring a myth (an ad, a song, an image, an artifact, a garment) to class

Opt: Pierre Bourdieu, "The Intellectual Field: A World Apart" (X)
Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" (During)
Michael Bérubé, "Bite-Size Theory" (X)
Stanley Fish, "Is There a Text in This Class?" (X)

Leaders: Group 1
Responses: Group 2


UNIT 1: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Week 2 Semiotics and Structuralism

1/29 Terry Eagleton, "The Rise of English" (X)
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, chap. 1
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics , pp. 6-17, 65-100
Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" Structural Anthropology
and "Principles of Kinship" (X)
Gayle S. Rubin, "The Traffic in Women" (X)

Opt: Roman Jakobson, "The Two Poles of Language," and
"The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles" (X)
A.J. Greimas, "The Semiotic Square" (X)
C. S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs" (X)
Emile Benveniste, "The Nature of Pronouns" and "Subjectivity in Language" (X)

Leaders: Group 2
Responses: Group 3

Week 3 Narratology to Poststructualism

2/5 Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,"
"From Work to Text," "Death of the Author," "The Rhetoric of the Image,"
in Image /Music /Text and excerpt from S/Z (Easthope and McGowan)
Kaja Silverman, Subject of Semiotics, chap. 6
Vladimir Propp, fromMorphology of the Folktale (X)
J. L. Austin, from How to Do Things With Words (X)
Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky" excerpt

Leaders: Group 3
Responses: Group 1
Week 4 Deconstruction

2/12 Jacques Derrida, from "Differance"(Easthope and McGowan)
from "Of Grammatology," (X) "Sructure, Sign and Play" (X)
Helene Cixous from Sorties (Easthope and McGowan)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g)"
Zora Neale Hurston, from Mules and Men (X)
Barbara Johnson, "Nothing Fails Like Success," and "Rigorous Unreliability" (X)
Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory" (X)
Readings fromThe Purloined Poe (X)

Leaders: Group 1
Responses: Group 2

Week 5 Discourse

2/19 Michel Foucault, "The Body of the Condemned," "Panopticism" in Discipline and Punish
"Two Lectures" in Power/Knowledge (X)
Michel de Certeau, from The Practice of Everyday Life (X)
Gilles Deleuze, "Minor Literature: Kafka" (X)
Mikhail Bakhtin, "Laughter and Freedom" (X)
Edward Said fromOrientalism (Easthope and McGowan)

Leaders: Group 2
Responses: Group 3

Identify topics and preliminary bibliography for papers

UNIT 2: PSYCHOANALYSIS

Week 6 Subjectivity and Signification

2/26 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, chap.2-4
Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I"
and "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Ecrits
Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 2 & 6

View: The Earrings of Madame de .... (Max Ophuls, 1953, 105 min.)

Leaders: Group 3
Responses: Group 1

Week 7 Phallogocentrism/ Sexual Difference

3/5 Sigmund Freud, "Some Psychical Consequences" "Medusa's Head," "Fetishism"
and "Femininity" (X)
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora)
Jacques Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus" Ecrits
Kaja Silverman, chap. 5 The Subject of Semiotics
Selected essays from In Dora's Case
Laura Mulvey from "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (Easthope and McGowan)
View: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, 124 min.)

Leaders: Group 1
Responses: Group 2


SPRING BREAK


UNIT 3: IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE

Week 8 Essential Debates in Feminist Theory

3/19 Teresa de Lauretis, "Upping the Anti [Sic] in Feminist Theory" (During)
and "Technology of Gender" (X)
Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," "Women on the Market," "Commodities
Among Themselves," "These Lips Which Speak Together" (X)
Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater" (X)
Donna Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (X)
Trinh Minh-ha, "Difference: A Special Third World Women's Issue" (X)
Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes" (X)
Caren Kaplan, "The Politics of Location"

Leaders: Group 2
Responses: Group 3

First version of paper due


Week 9 Queer Theories
3/26 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Axiomatic" and "The Epistemology of the Closet"
Monique Wittig, "The Straight Mind" (X)
Judith Butler, "From Parody to Politics" (X)
Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" (X)

Leaders: Group 3
Responses: Group 1

Week 10 Race, Nation and Beyond

4/2 W.E.B. Dubois from The Souls of Black Folks (X)
Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness" (X) Black Skin/White Masks
and "On National Culture" from The Wretched of the Earth (X)
Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory" (X)
Edward Said, "Introduction," Culture and Imperialism
Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (X)
Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question," and "The Commitment to Theory" (X)

Leaders: Group 3
Responses: Group 1
UNIT 4: CULTURAL POLITICS: MARXIST LEGACIES

Week 11 Commodity and Ideology

4/9 Karl Marx, "The Commodity" from Capital
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, from The German Ideology (Easthope and McGowan)
Louis Althusser, from "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
(Easthope and McGowan)
Pierre Macherey, from "Theory of Literary Production" (Easthope & McGowan)
Frederic Jameson, "Introduction," The Political Unconscious

Leaders: Group 1
Responses: Group 2

Week 12 The Frankfurt School

4/16 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry" (During)
Walter Benjamin, selections from Illuminations
Theodor Adorno, "On the Regressive Character of Listening" (X)
Frederic Jameson from The Political Unconscious

Leaders: Group 2
Responses: Group 3

Second version of paper due

Week 13 Postmodernism

4/23 Frederic Jameson, from "Postmodernism," (Easthope and McGowan)
Jean Baudrillard, from Simulations (Easthope and McGowan)
Jean-Francois Lyotard, from The Postmodern Condition
Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism" (X)
Armand Mattelart, Xavier Delcourt, Michele Mattelart, "International Image Markets"
Meagan Morris, "Things to Do With Shopping Centres" (During)

Leaders: Group 3
Responses: Group 1

Week 14 Popular Culture

4/30 Antonio Gramsci from The Prison Notebooks (X)
Raymond Williams, from Culture and Society (Easthope and McGowan)
"Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" (X), and "Popular"
Stuart Hall, "Encoding, Decoding" (During)
Dick Hebdige, "From Culture to Hegemony" (During)
Pierre Bourdieu, "Artistic Taste and Cultural Capital" (X)
Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia" (During)
Ien Ang, "Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture" (During)
Janice Radway, "The Institutional Matrix of Romance" (During)

Final version of paper due date TBA